The hottest housing market of 2017

Not only is Washington’s largest city home to internet juggernaut Amazon (Yahoo FInance’s Company of 2017), it also holds the title for the city with the fastest-growing home prices. Since September 2016, Seattle has been leading the S&P CoreLogic Case Shiller Home Price 20-City Composite Index and has maintained that spot each month. There’s no doubt that Amazon has been fueling the city’s real estate market but population and job growth coupled with high demand and low inventory are also lifting prices.

“Seattle is consistently outpacing the rest of the country,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors. “High-tech workers are concentrated or were concentrated in the San Francisco, Silicon Valley area where prices got way too high. Seattle provides an alternative for people.”

Median sales price in Seattle was $478,500 in the third quarter of this year, up 13.4% from the same time last year, according to the NAR. That’s not exactly cheap since the median sales price in the U.S. was $254,000, but it’s still half of the price of a home in San Francisco, where the median sales price was $900,000.